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Friday, March 09, 2007

Courts - Series on improperly sealed court files nominated for Pulitzer

The Pulitzer Finalists have been leaked. The ILB looked up some of the finalists' stories/series and found two terrific law-related series. One was on consumer debt - see more here. The other, from the Seattle Times, is titled "Your Courts, Their Secrets."

The ILB had an entry quoting from the Seattle Times when the series came out, but there is much more here at the series homepage. Check it out - good weekend reading.

This interesting piece, titled "About this project: Ferreting out who, what and why," describes the process the reporters used in their effort to uncover cases that had been inappropriately sealed from public view. It begins:

For this project, we needed to do three things:

Find the sealed files. Figure out who's suing whom. Find out who sealed the file, and why.

Finding the files

The clerk's office at King County Superior Court doesn't keep a list of sealed court cases. So we searched for indicators.

The state Administrative Office of the Courts helped. It ran computer searches of electronic court dockets, looking for docket codes or words (for example, "seal" or "confidential") that suggested a case had been sealed in whole or part. These runs kicked up thousands of cases going back to 1990. (We were looking only for civil lawsuits, such as medical-malpractice cases. The searches did not cover divorce or criminal cases.)

We then checked the cases at the courthouse. You type a case number into the computer, and if the case is sealed, a message pops up, denying access.

We also checked older files that had been shelved instead of scanned into the computer. We walked down rows of files at the clerk's office, looking for yellow folder-sized markers that indicate a case is sealed and locked away in a separate room.

We discovered nearly 300 cases the clerk's office had sealed by mistake. In most, only part of the file was supposed to be sealed. Alerted to these errors, the clerk's office opened up those files.*

We found more than 1,000 cases sealed in part. In some, such crucial records as the complaint or rulings summarizing the evidence were sealed.

In the end, we found 420 civil cases that have been sealed in their entirety since 1990. But there could be more.

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*The ILB ran across a similar situation in the Indiana Clerk of the Courts office last month, as set out in this Feb. 13th ILB entry headed "Sealed documents in otherwise 'unsealed' cases." For years, apparently, cases containing any sealed documents were not included in the electronic docket (although you could view the unsealed part of the file if you asked for it by name in the Clerk's office).

After consulting with Kevin S. Smith, Clerk of the Courts, I was assured that changes were already underway and that, in the future, cases would not be totally sealed (and thus excluded from the electronic docket) simply because their file included a sealed document.

I was told that any such cases improperly sealed in the past which were brought to the attention of the Clerk's office would be unsealed, but that this change in dealing with the files would be prospective only, "as we have no way of knowing what cases were previously handled under the 'old' way" before [we] changed our practice."

After further investigation, however, it was determined by Mr. Smith that IT could run a search to flag any "sealed" cases that might meet the criteria for unsealing, and that staff could then, per a note from Mr. Smith dated Feb. 16th, "cull through the results to make any 'sealed' designation changes for 'unsealed' cases we find. It may take a few weeks, since our IT request will have to be placed 'in the cue' with others ahead of ours and since the first priority of my office has to be keeping up with the daily case flow, but we'll get it done as soon as possible."

This ILB considers this to have been a very positive development. When the process is completed, the ILB hopes to obtain a list of the appellate cases the records of which may now for the first time be accessed via the Clerk of the Courts online electronic docket.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on March 9, 2007 01:14 PM
Posted to Courts in general